Interior perspective of The Evidence Room with models of Auschwitz gas column and gastight hatch, plaster casts and model of gastight door. Photo by Fred Hunsberger.
THE EVIDENCE ROOM SUMMARIZES THE FORENSIC ANALYSIS OF THE ARCHITECTURE OF AUSCHWITZ AT THE 15TH INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION ? LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA ?REPORTING FROM THE FRONT?
The Evidence Room, by Anne Bordeleau, Sascha Hastings, Donald McKay, and Robert Jan van Pelt, has opened as part of ?Reporting from the Front,? the central group exhibition of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition ? La Biennale di Venezia, curated by its Artistic Director, Alejandro Aravena.
In 2000, a libel suit argued before the Royal Courts of Justice in London, England successfully challenged the false assertion by a revisionist historian and Holocaust denier that there had been no gas chambers in Auschwitz and that therefore the Holocaust didn?t happen. Central to the proceedings were the forensic interpretation of the architectural evidence of Auschwitz and the expert witness testimony by Robert Jan van Pelt, an architecture professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His interpretation and his testimony about the design and operation of those buildings as a killing facility were integral to winning the case and to asserting the truth of the Holocaust ? the defining crime of the twentieth century. Van Pelt?s report ? published as The Case for Auschwitz ? became one of the sources of inspirati...